A Pleasant Bit of Natural History: “Knocking About the Rockies” by Ernest Ingersoll (1883)

 book review, Books, Landscape History, Natural History, Prehistory, Sense of Place  No Responses »
Sep 192022
 

The next fortnight was not productive of many adventures or noteworthy incidents, though it contained plenty of hard work. Our track led across into the head of the San Luis Park, and so on down to Saguache — a Mexican town near the Rio Grande. There was a pleasant bit of natural history picked up along here, though.

The plover of these interior valleys does not seem to care for marshes, like the most of his race, but haunts the dry uplands. It is closely related to the golden plover, and is named in books Aegialitis montanus. A flock of these plovers dropped down on the plain one day, and I determined to get them for dinner, if possible. Jumping off my horse — who would stand stock-still wherever I left him— I approached to where they had dropped, and finally caught sight of one by distinguishing the dark dot of its eye against the light-tinted surface of the ground. Even then I really could not follow with my eye the outline of the bird’s body, so closely did the colors of the plumage agree with the white sand and dry grass. I shot it ; then found another, shot that; and so on until all were killed, none of them flying away, because their ” instinct,” or habit of thought, had taught them that when danger threatened they must invariably keep quiet ; movement would be exposure, and exposure would be fatal. I and my gun formed a danger they had had no experience of, and here their inherited “instinct” was at fault. When I had shot them I was unable, with he most careful searching, to find all the dead birds.

Ernest Ingersol’s early book, Knocking About the Rockies, chronicles two trips he took into the Rockies (1874 and 1877), accompanying scientific and surveying expeditions. His flair for natural history (he would go on to write a dozen works in the “nature” realm, one previously covered in this blog, with several more awaiting reading) led me to this book and his subsequent one about travels by train through the Rockies (The Crest of the Continent, 1885). I eagerly anticipated observations and reflections on the wildlife of the region. And he delivered well, including several allusions to Thoreau. What I had not reckoned on was that many of them would take a culinary turn. Here, “a pleasant bit of natural history” includes identifying a new bird species and then shooting it for dinner. Or not even dinner. Maybe just as a specimen to observe more closely, or possibly just because his gun is handy?

Climbing a high point back of our tents, which were in the midst of a sage-brush flat, close to the river, I had a queer little bit of good luck one evening. It was just at nightfall, and as I reached the top a large owl came swooping down and perched on a crag some distance off. Drawing my revolver, I held it up and walked slowly nearer, expecting neither to get within range nor hit the bird if I fired; but he let me get so near that at last, about thirty yards off, I blazed away, and down came the owl. Rushing up, I could see him lying in the brush a little way below; but it was some time before I got courage enough to reach down and take hold of him, for a bite or talon-grasp from a wounded owl is no joke. He proved to be stone-dead, and it was a long time before I found out the bloodless wound, the bullet having gone in at the base of the skull and out of the open mouth, without tearing any of the feathers. He was a fine barred or “cat” owl, about two feet long.

I am sure the owl did not appreciate this “queer little bit of good luck”.

It is easy, in hindsight, to condemn this behavior in a would-be naturalist. Of course, the great bird illustrator John James Audubon shot all his bird specimens, too, attaching their lifeless bodies to branches in order to draw them. While one or more cameras accompanied these expeditions — several of the illustrations in the book are engravings from photographs — photography had not advanced enough yet to make close-up images of wildlife possible. The understood technique for close study of animals was to shoot them first. This was slowly changing, as birders began carrying opera glasses into the field instead. And Ingersoll, himself, would rein in his hunting proclivities in his later volumes. Finally, it is to be noted that, in order to travel light and save money, the expeditions carried little food, intending that protein needs be satisfied with hunting and trapping.

Now that we have gotten that aspect of this book out of the way, we can sit back and enjoy some lovely late 19th Century prose about the wilds of the Colorado Rockies (including some delightful geological terms). Here is Grand Lake as seen (more like imagined, actually) from a mountaintop, sounding truly grand indeed:

From this pinnacle, in daylight, there is visible a picture of blue mountains whose sharp, serrated outline indicates a portion of the main range in front of Long’s Peak. Among those immutable yet ever-changing bulwarks lies a lake in a circle of guardian peaks whose heads tower thousands of feet above it, and whose bases meet no one knows how far below the surface of its dark waters. It is Grand Lake, a spot taboo among Indians and mysterious to white men. The scenery is primeval and wild beyond description: Roundtop is one mountain at least that has suffered no desecration since the ice ploughed its furrowed sides. The lake itself lies in the trough of a glacier basin, and its western barrier is an old terminal moraine, striking evidences of glacial action occurring on all sides in the scored cliffs and lateral moraines that hem it in. Its extent is about two miles by three, and its greatest depth unfathomable with a line six hundred feet in length. The water is cold, and clear near the shore, but of inky blackness in the middle. In the reflection usually pictured upon its calm bosom all the cloud-crowned heads about it meet in solemn conclave; but not seldom, and with little warning, furious winds sweep down and lash its lazy waters till the waves vie with each other in terrible energy.

Ingersoll clearly had a passion for climbing peaks and gazing out upon the landscape from their heights. Here, he waxes religious in extolling the glories of just such an experience:

However interesting it might prove, time forbids even to suggest all that meets the eye and is implanted in the memory while one is sitting for two or three hours on a peak of the Rocky Mountains — the surprising clearness of the air, so that your vision penetrates a hundred and fifty miles; the steady gale of wind sucked up from the heated valleys ; the frost and lightning shattered fragments of rock incrusted with lichens, orange and green and drab and white; the miniature mountains and scheme of drainage spread before you; the bright blue and yellow mats of moss-blossoms ; the herds of big-horned sheep, unconscious of your watching; the hawks leisurely sailing their vast aerial circles level with your eye ; the shadows of the clouds chasing each other across the landscape; the clouds and the azure dome itself; the purple, snow-embroidered horizon of mountains, “upholding heaven, holding down earth.” I can no more express with leaden types the ineffable, intangible ghost and grace of such an experience than I can weigh out to you the ozone that empurples the dust raised by the play of the antelopes in yonder amethyst valley. Moses need have chosen no particular mountain whereon to receive his inspiration. The divine Heaven approaches very near all these peaks.

Not that Ingersoll found every experience on his travels filled him with awe and wonder. Here, he expresses quite different sentiments in a dark spruce forest in the mountains:

What a sombre world that of the pine-woods is! None of the cheerfulness of the ash and maple groves — the alternation of sunlight and changing shadow, rustling leaves and fragrant shrubbery underneath, variety of foliage and bark on which to rest the jaded eye, exciting curiosity and delight: only the straight, upright trunks; the colorless, dusty ground; the dense masses of dead green, each mass a repetition of another; the scraggy skeletons of dead trees, all their bare limbs drooping in lamentation. The sound of the wind in the pines is equally grewsome. If the breeze be light, you hear a low, melancholy monody; if stronger, a hushed kind of sighing; when the hurricane lays his hand upon them the groaning trees wail out in awful agony, and, racked beyond endurance, cast themselves headlong to the stony ground. At such times each particular fibre of the pine’s body seems resonant with pain, and the straining branches literally shriek. This is not mere fancy, but something quite different from anything to be observed in hardwood forests. There the tempest roars; here it howls. I do not think the idea of the Banshee spirits could have arisen elsewhere than among the pines ; nor that any mythology growing up among people inhabiting these forests could have omitted such supernatural beings from its theogony.

But do not conclude that the gloom of the pine-woods clouded our spirits. So many trees had fallen where our tents were pitched that the sunshine peered down there, and at night the moon looked in upon us, rising weirdly over a vista of dead and lonely tree-tops. Then, too, the brook was always singing in our ears — absolutely singing! The sound of the incessant tumble of the water and boiling of the eddies made a heavy undertone, like the surf of the sea; but the breaking of the current over the higher rocks and the leaping of the foam down the cataracts produced a distinctly musical sound — a mystical ringing of sweet-toned bells. There is no mistaking this metallic melody, this clashing of tiny cymbals, and it must be this miniature blithe harmony that fine ears have heard on the beach in summer where the surf breaks gently.

While Ingersoll viewed these mountains, forests, and grasslands with rapture, he also saw what would soon be. Observing extensive grasslands at the feet of the mountain peaks, Ingersoll remarked that “Here are the future pastures for millions of cattle, and they are sure to be occupied.” I find it strange that for all the natural beauty he witnessed, he seemed resigned to (or even somewhat enthusiastic about) a future in which the Rockies would be dramatically modified — and the bison would nearly go extinct.

New Powers of Vision: “Locusts and Wild Honey” by John Burroughs (1879)

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Sep 182022
 

We open another eye whenever we see beyond the first general features or outlines of things–whenever we grasp the special details and characteristic markings that this mask covers. Science confers new powers of vision.

Whenever you have learned to discriminate the birds, or the plants, or the geological features of a country, it is as if new and keener eyes were added.

Of course one must not only see sharply, but read aright what he sees. The facts in the life of Nature that are transpiring about us are like written words that the observer is to arrange into sentences. Or the writing is in cipher and he must furnish the key.

Here, in what is undoubtedly the finest essay in this volume (“Sharp Eyes”), Burroughs hints at possessing an ecological vision, half a century before the term “ecosystem” was coined in 1935. (Although Ernest Haeckel came up with “ecology” in 1866, that concept, too, awaited the 20th century to develop much further.) Yet here, in this passage, lies the beginnings of a transition from merely identifying living things (birds, plants, etc.) to seeing living things in relationship to each other and the landscape. The more naturalists enhance their base of knowledge, the more “words” they can glimpse, and the better authors they can become, assembling the words into meaningful sentences that can tell wonderful tales: “Little dramas and tragedies and comedies, little characteristic scenes, are always being enacted in the lives of the birds, if our eyes are sharp enough to see them.” Wonder emerges when we look beyond the name of the bird, to begin exploring its behaviors at a particular moment.

Later in the same essay, Burroughs offers further guidance on seeing the natural world deeply:

…the habit of observation is the habit of clear and decisive gazing. Not by a first casual glance, but by a steady deliberate aim of the eye are the rare and characteristic things discovered. You must look intently and hold your eye firmly to the spot, to see more than do the rank and file of mankind. The sharp-shooter picks out his man and knows him with fatal certainty from a stump, or a rock, or a cap on a pole. The phrenologists do well to locate, not only form, color, and weight, in the region of the eye, but also a faculty which they call individuality–that which separates, discriminates, and sees in every object its essential character. This is just as necessary to the naturalist as to the artist or the poet. The sharp eye notes specific points and differences,–it seizes upon and preserves the individuality of the thing.

These insights (in a literal and figurative sense) comprise the highlight of this volume. I think of this work as one of transition; he moved to a farm in the Hudson Valley in 1873, so these essays mark his first encounters with a landscape he would grow to know even more deeply over the next 48 years. Many of his delightful works deeply rooted in the Hudson landscape and adjacent regions of New York State (such as the Catskills) were yet to be penned in 1879. I found these writings pleasant enough, I suppose, and certainly diverse; they covered beekeeping, trout fishing, weather prognostication, wild strawberries, traveling, an expedition to Canada, and, of course, birds of all kinds. (One essay, comparing British birds to American ones, is even entitled, “Birds and Birds”. Cue Monty Python’s infamous “Spam Song”.)

A couple more passages will suffice, I think, to offer a satisfactory sampling of Locusts and Wild Honey. In his “Birds and Birds” essay, Burroughs reminds us of how long ago the book was written. In 1879, passenger pigeons were still fairly abundant. This led Burroughs to wonder, “The pigeon lays but two eggs, and is preyed upon by both man and beast, millions of them meeting a murderous death every year; yet always some part of the country is swarming with untold numbers of them.” A tragic footnote, dated 1895, adds that “This is no longer the case. The passenger pigeon now seems on the verge of extinction.” Even Burroughs didn’t see that coming.

Next, a lovely, rich description of Rondout Brook in the Catskills, complete with some 19th century geological terms:

If there ever was a stream cradled in the rocks, detained lovingly by them, held and fondled in a rocky lap or tossed in rocky arms, that.stream is the Rondout. Its course for several miles from its head is over the stratified rock, and into this it has worn a channel that presents most striking and peculiar features. Now it comes silently along on the top of the rock, spread out and flowing over that thick, dark green moss that is found only in the coldest streams; then drawn into a narrow canal only four or five feet wide, through which it shoots, black and rigid, to be presently caught in a deep basin with shelving, overhanging rocks, beneath which the pheebe-bird builds in security, and upon which the fisherman stands and casts his twenty or thirty feet of line without fear of being thwarted by the brush ; then into a black, well-like pool, ten or fifteen feet deep, with a smooth, circular wall of rock on one side worn by the water through long ages; or else into a deep, oblong pocket, into which and out of which the water glides without a ripple.

The surface rock is a coarse sandstone superincumbent upon a lighter-colored conglomerate that looked like Shawangunk grits, and when this latter is reached by the water it seems to be rapidly disintegrated by it, thus forming the deep excavations alluded to.

My eyes had never before beheld such beauty in a mountain stream. The water was almost as trans- parent as the air, — was, indeed, like liquid air; and as it lay in these wells and pits enveloped in shadow, or lit up by a chance ray of the vertical sun, it was a perpetual feast to the eye, —so cool, so deep, so pure; every reach and pool like a vast spring. You lay down and drank or dipped the water up in your cup, and found it just the right degree of refreshing coldness. One is never prepared for the clearness of the water in these streams. It is always a surprise… Absolutely without stain or hint of impurity, it seems to magnify like a lens, so that the bed of the stream and the fish in it appear deceptively near. It is rare to find even a trout stream that is not a little “off color,” as they say of diamonds, but the waters in the section of which I am writing have the genuine ray; it is the undimmed and untarnished diamond.

If I were a trout, I should ascend every stream till I found the Rondout. It is the ideal brook. What homes these fish have, what retreats under the rocks, what paved or flagged courts and areas, what crystal depths where no net or snare can reach them!—no mud, no sediment, but here and there in the clefts and seams of the rock patches of white gravel, — spawning beds ready-made.

The finishing touch is given by the moss with which the rock is everywhere carpeted. Even in the narrow grooves or channels where the water runs the swiftest, the green lining is unbroken. It sweeps down under the stream and up again on the other side, like some firmly-woven texture. It softens every outline and cushions every stone.

Oh, for the days when naturalists out in the wilds would drink the waters of mountain streams with delight (and impunity)!

I close with this marvelous quote, from the same essay as above (“A Bed of Boughs”), on the virtues of immersing oneself in wild nature: “It is our partial isolation from Nature that is dangerous; throw yourself unreservedly upon her and she rarely betrays you.”

Three volumes of my 23-volume Burroughs collection down, and 20 more to go. Stay tuned…

The Sandy Sand-Lover: “Beach Grass” by Charles Wendell Townsend (1923)

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Aug 212022
 

In “Sand Dunes and Salt Marshes” I made note of intimate studies of such regions in my sojourns at Ipswich, of the varied forms and movements of the sand, of the growth and origin of the salt marsh and of the life in the dunes and the marshes both animal and vegetable. In the following pages I have endeavored to set forth additional studies in these same regions.

I have called the present volume by the title of “Beach Grass”, partly because this grass is so characteristic of the region and partly because of the meaning of its scientific name — Ammophila arenaria — the sandy sand-lover.

I am on a streak of two now. Again I have selected a book whose single greatest asset is its cover. I do not speak ill of the book’s contents, really — the cover, yet again, is quite visually appealing. The book as a whole simply never achieves greatness. But then again, Towsend warns readers from the beginning that he is effectively publishing an addendum to his earlier volume (previously reviewed). While Sand Dunes and Salt Marshes was intended to cover, in turn, the various landscape types of the Ipswich coast, this book feels instead like a smattering of additional bits — bonus material to what came before. Several times in the book, Townsend refers readers back to his first volume. Here, he builds on what came before, with more (and better) photographs of dunes and dune tracks, and an extensive section of several chapters on winter conditions along the coast. Then there is a section on a small forest that Townsend planted on his coastal property, and the lean-to he constructed within it. I cannot help but think of the cabin at Walden, though Townsend leaves the philosophizing to others in favor of straightforward accounts of his observations. At one point in a later chapter (“Hawking” — observing hawks, not hunting with them), Townsend even dares a dig at Thoreau:

It is true that one’s aesthetic sense may be gratified and one may receive great enjoyment from birds and flowers without knowledge of their structure or names. But on the other hand it is not true that a study of structure and the recognition of the species in the field is a detriment to the pure enjoyment of these wonderful creatures of nature. The musician who understands the musical composition of a symphony and whose ear is attuned to all its finer points, receives at a concert infinitely more pleasure than one who is ignorant of these matters. One who has studied flowers and birds and is able to distinguish the exact kind and the significance of form and markings, sees far more of their beauty than one not so trained and he obtains correspondingly more enjoyment. The untrained observer often fails to see the bird or flower at all, and if it is called to his attention, sees it but imperfectly. The enjoyment shown by naturalists — and I refer to the out-of-doors and not to the closet type — is evidenced in their writings. Wilson, Audubon, Darwin and Wallace, Gilbert White and Hudson are conspicuous examples. I am sure, although it is heresy to say so, Thoreau would have had more pleasure from his studies of out-of-doors and would have given the world more pleasure, if he had been willing to study more closely and identify more carefully birds and flowers.

Zing. OK, another reason this book doesn’t quite leave me enraptured.

Speaking of rapture, though, Townsend took a particular fascination for the ever-shifting coastal dunes. Here he describes two nighttime encounters with them — first at the full moon, and again during the autumn bird migrations:

At the time of the full moon the fascination of the sand dunes is increased to a superlative degree. The whiteness of the sand augments the brilliancy of the moonlight, just as is the case when the landscape is white with snow. Such a night was that of September 25 and 26, 1920. It was calm and warm, 68° Farenheit by the cricket thermometer. As I wandered alone about the dunes, listening to the voices of the birds passing overhead, and of those on the shore and sea, I was alert for a glimpse of night-wandering animals whose tracks were clearly visible by moonlight. Exposing a photographic plate for twenty minutes to the mysterious scene, I patiently waited and watched during this interval but saw no track-maker. The sky on the sandy horizon — on the crest of a sand wave — looked black in comparison with the white sand, but this starless darkness soon merged into the vault of the heavens with its suggestion of blue, studded sparsely with stars. Only those of greater magnitude showed in the brilliant light of the moon; the light of the lesser ones was quenched. We pay for the light of the full moon by loss of starlight just as we pay for sunshine by loss of moonlight. About five in the morning the moon set large and red, and the lesser as well as the greater stars blazed out, and the path of the Milky Way appeared across the heavens.

After a period of unfavorable wind or weather, a perfect night may come when the floodgates of bird migration are opened, and the pent-up multitudes, waiting for this chance, pour along the aerial channels. Such a night followed September 9, 1916, and it was my good fortune to spend it in the dunes and on the beach. The air, blown as clear as crystal by a sparkling northwest wind, and illuminated by the full moon, and its reflection from the sea and white sand, made the night almost as light as day. There was a brilliancy and ethereal quality suggestive of fairyland. Such nights as these fill one with rapture at the marvelous beauty and mystery of the sand dunes.

Here is another somewhat poetic passage from yet another night he spent among the dunes, interspersed with a couple of lines of poetry from William Wordsworth:

At night there is a gentle mystery and a sense of primeval grandeur in the sand dunes that sur- passes the mystery and the grandeur of the day. It is good for the soul to escape from the conven- tionalities of life and lose itself in darkness in this waste of sand. Like a wolf, turning and shaping his form in the grass before he lies down, so the dune-lover shapes his form in the sand, hollowing places for his shoulders and hips. Lying thus in his mold, securely wrapt in his blanket, on the crest of a dune wave, he sees the sun set, the blue eclipse of the sky by the earth rise in the East, and the pink glow overhead and in the West gradually fade. Swallows in straggling bands and in great multitudes, hastening to their night roost, skim close by, sometimes within a hair’s breadth of his face. The dark, ungraceful forms of night herons pass over with slow wing-flaps and discordant croaks, and the stars come out until the whole vault of heaven is aglow. Those who dwell in caves, in deep canyons or in rooms in city streets, know not the brilliancy of the heavens as revealed to those who lie out under the stars. They know not:

”The silence that is in the starry sky. The sleep that is among the lonely hills.”

The laughing cry of the loon comes to his ears from the sea and the noisy clamor of a great company of herring gulls, gossiping with each other as they settle down for a night on the shore. Sandpipers and plovers whistle as they fly over, and the lisping notes of warblers, mi- grating from the sterile cold of the North, drop from above. Forming a continuous background to these voices is the boom and the crash of the waves on the sea beach.

For the sake of full disclosure, Townsend also shares a couple of nights among the dunes that did not pass so beautifully, thanks to the ravages of sandblasting winds and numerous vicious mosquitoes.

While Townsend’s first volume was published in 1913, this one is a decade later, with the Great War between them. In a couple of places here, memories of the war appear, offering hints of how many ravages it had wrought and how much it lingered in the American consciousness. Describing the impacts of a severe ice storm on the trees, he writes of a white maple whose “soft and brittle wood was unable to bear the heavy load of ice, and the snow underneath was covered with branches and great limbs torn and splintered as if the trees had been through a German barrage.” A few pages later, he describes experiencing the Northern lights as a patriotic vision:

Although the aurora borealis is not limited to the winter season, it is displayed to greatest perfection at that time. One of the most beautiful auroras I have ever seen occurred one cold clear night in March, 1918, during the Great War, and the superstitious might well have read omens in its display. A series of white streamers radiated from the zenith, constantly waving and changing their places. Whole sections of the sky glowed a blood red, as if it reflected a mighty conflagration or a mighty slaughter, and the snow was tinged with the crimson flood. When this crimson sky was crossed with bars of white with here and there patches of dark blue, it needed little imagination to picture a draping of the sky with Old Glory.

Finally, I cannot help but include in this highly scattered review some mention of a passage that suggests that concern over climate change — specifically, warming — actually dates back a full century. Ironically, Townsend argues firmly that the climate is unchanging (using quite valid scientific arguments to make his case):

Severe winters are sure to recur either singly or in a series and they are apt to shake the faith, temporarily at least, of those who say the climate is changing and is much milder than when they were young. Then, according to these wise ones, snow came regularly at Thanksgiving and there was sleighing until the end of March. Meteorological records kept for many years show that mild winters and severe winters occurred a generation ago as they do today, and that the snowfall has varied irregularly…

…in the long run, the cold and warm, the dry and wet balance each other, and the general average is the same. Meteorologists believe that there has been no material change in the climate within historical times.

Yet it is a common idea that the climate of New England is growing milder, and when we have much cold and snow, the older people speak of it as an ”old-fashioned winter.” The human mind is prone to remember vividly and even to magnify unusual events and seasons, while ordinary seasons of snowfall are forgotten. Then, too, a snowdrift three feet high, struggled through by a child, assumes gigantic proportions in the memory when the child has reached mature age and size.

In our cities a generation ago, the snowfall was not managed as efficiently as it is now, when powerful snow ploughs and gangs of men clear the streets within a few hours of the storm. In former days the snow was allowed to accumulate and remained longer in the way of traffic. Another cause for self-deception exists with those who have spent their earlier years in inland towns or country where the snowfall is greater and comes earlier than it does in coastal regions. A very few miles often makes a considerable difference.

While the Industrial Revolution marked the beginnings of the increase in carbon dioxide in our atmosphere, 1923 was far too early for meteorologists to detect a warming signal. Still, it is intriguing that some people were convinced otherwise back then.

My copy of this book is marked by a holiday dedication from C. D. Tinker to his/her dear friend, Norman Wood, in December of 1926. Unfortunately, without a first name, C. D. Tinker is impossible to track down online, and the same is the case for Norman Wood, whose name is too commonplace — I simply cannot see the Wood for the Woods. I do hope Norman enjoyed this book.

Blue-Sky Philosophy: “Little Rivers” by Henry Van Dyke (1895)

 Birds, book review, Books, Native Plants, Natural History, Sense of Place  No Responses »
Aug 182022
 

You shall not be deceived in this book. It is nothing but a handful of rustic variations on the old tune of ” Rest and be thankful,” a record of unconventional travel, a pilgrim’s scrip with a few bits of blue-sky philosophy in it. There is, so far as I know, very little useful information and absolutely no criticism of the universe to be found in this volume. So if you are what Izaak Walton calls “a severe, sour- complexioned man,” you would better carry it back to the bookseller, and get your money gain, if lie will give it to you, and go your way rejoicing after your own melancholy fashion.

But if you care for plain pleasures, and informal company, and friendly observations on men and things, (and a few true fish-stories) then perhaps you may find something here not unworthy your perusal. And so I wish that your winter fire may burn clear and bright while you read these pages; and that the summer days may be fair, and the fish may rise merrily to your fly, whenever you follow one of these little rivers.

I am still not entirely clear what blue-sky philosophy means, even though I think it describes this book well. There is no suffering or sorrow in these pages, nor does the book dive deeply into anything. It is like a stone skipping along the surface of a pond, carrying the reader merrily along to nowhere in particular. Its author and protagonist is Henry Van Dyke (1852-1933): writer of fiction and essays, educator, foreign diplomat, and clergyman. His many volumes, popular in their day, are virtually unread now. Quite a few of them were issued with stunning Art Nouveau covers by Margaret Armstrong (1867-1944), and this has earned them a space in many art museum collections. Alas, in this case, the four dragonflies gracing the cover do not appear in the text.

OK, I admit that I jumped at the excuse to read a work of Van Dyke (one might even say that I angled for it), simply to own a copy of one of Margaret Armstrong’s stunning works from the 1903/4 edition of the book. I had hoped that it would turn out to fit well into the “nature book” category, even though I knew it was ostensibly about fishing. Van Dyke’s literary knowledge is fairly wide-ranging, and he includes quotes by Hamilton Mabie and John Burroughs. Indeed, when suggesting books one might take on a nature outing, he asks, “Are not John Burroughs’ cheerful, kindly essays full of woodland truth and companionship?” His botanical and ornithological knowledge seems fairly robust, though he shows a marked preference for common names over Latin ones. Alas, though, the skipping stone gathers no moss; having named a plant or bird, he rarely pauses long enough to describe its habits. Van Dyke carries the reader along on his journeys to rivers in New England, Quebec, and Europe, often accompanied by his wife, whom he refers to as “Graygown”. He tells a pleasant story about his travels and the fish he catches (or fails to catch) and remarks about the human and natural landscapes he encounters along the way. One of the few brief “nature passages” I found was this one, reporting his ascent of Nuvolau, a mountain in Italy:

Monte Nuvolau is not a perilous mountain. I am quite sure that at my present time of life I should be unwilling to ascend a perilous mountain unless there were something extraordinarily desirable at the top, or remarkably disagreeable at the bottom. Mere risk has lost the attractions which it once had. As the father of a family I felt bound to abstain from going for amusement into any place which a Christian lady might not visit with propriety and safety. Our preparation for Nuvolau, therefore, did not consist of ropes, ice-irons, and axes, but simply of a lunch and two long sticks.

Our way led us, in the early morning, through the clustering houses of Lacedel, up the broad, green slope that faces Cortina on the west, to the beautiful Alp Pocol. Nothing could exceed the pleasure of such a walk in the cool of the day, while the dew still lies on the short, rich grass, and the myriads of flowers are at their brightest and sweetest. The infinite variety and abundance of the blossoms is a continual wonder. They are sown more thickly than the stars in heaven, and the rainbow itself does not show so many tints. Here they are mingled like the threads of some strange embroidery; and there again nature has massed her colours; so that one spot will be all pale blue with innumerable forget-me-nots, or dark blue with gentians; another will blush with the delicate pink of the Santa Lucia or the deeper red of the clover; and another will shine yellow as cloth of gold. Over all this opulence of bloom the larks were soaring and singing. I never heard so many as in the meadows about Cortina. There was always a sweet spray of music sprinkling down out of the sky, where the singers poised un-seen. It was like walking through a shower of melody.

I will close this post with my favorite passage, from a fishing journey by canoe down the Peribonka River in Quebec. This excerpt concludes with Van Dyke pursuing his favorite pastime.

The river leaped, shouting, down its double stairway of granite, rejoicing like a strong man to run a race. The after-glow in the western sky deepened from saffron to violet among the tops of the cedars, and over the cliffs rose the moonlight, paling the heavens but glorifying the earth. There was something large and generous and untrammelled in the scene, recalling one of Walt Whitman’s rhapsodies : —

“Earth of departed sunsets ! Earth of the mountains misty-topped !

Earth of the vitreous pour of the full moon just tinged with blue!

Earth of shine and dark, mottling the tide of the river!”

All the next day we went down with the current. Regiments of black spruce stood in endless files like grenadiers, each tree capped with a thick tuft of matted cones and branches.

Tall white birches leaned out over the stream, Narcissus-like, as if to see their own beauty in the moving mirror. There were touches of colour on the banks, the ragged pink flowers of the Joe-Pye-weed (which always reminds me of a happy, good-natured tramp), and the yellow ear-drops of the jewel-weed, and the intense blue of the closed gentian, that strange flower which, like a reticent heart, never opens to the light. Sometimes the river spread out like a lake, between high bluffs of sand fully a mile apart; and again it divided into many channels, winding cunningly down among the islands as if it were resolved to slip around the next barrier of rock without a fall. There were eight of these huge natural dams in the course of that day’s journey. Sometimes we followed one of the side canals, and made the portage at a distance from the main cataract; and sometimes we ran with the central current to the very brink of the chute, darting aside just in time to escape going over. At the foot of the last fall we made our camp on a curving beach of sand, and spent the rest of the afternoon in fishing.

Only in Their Enchanted Silence: “Wildwood Ways” by Winthrop Packard (1909)

 Birds, book review, Books, Native Plants, Natural History, Sense of Place, Spirituality  1 Response »
Aug 162022
 

In spite of the soft raiment in which the weather garbs itself to-day it is only three days ago that the great organ of the woods piped to the northerly wind as it breathed pedal notes through the pines and piped shrill in the chestnut twigs. And there was more than organ music. The white and red oaks, still holding fast to their brown leaves, gave forth the rattling of a million delicate castanets, and the wind drew like a soft bow across the finer strings of the birches so that all among slender twigs you heard this fine tone of a muted violin singing a little tender song of joy. For the trees were sadly weary of being frozen one day and thawed the next. They thought the real winter was at hand when the cold would be continuous and the snow deep. All we northern-bred folk love the real winter and feel defrauded of our birthright if we do not get it.

Strangest of all were the beeches. They have held the lower of their tan-pale leaves and with them have whispered of snow all winter long. Whatever the day, you had but to stand among them with closed eyes and you could hear the beech word for snow going tick, tick, tick, all about. It seemed as if flakes must be falling and hitting the leaves so plainly they spoke it. Now that the flakes were beginning the beeches never said a word, but just stood mute and watched it come and listened to the music of all the other trees. Or perhaps they listened to something finer yet. It was only in their enchanted silence that I thought I heard it. Now and then the wind held its breath and the oak leaf castanets ceased, and then for a second I would be sure of it; an elfin tinkle so crepuscular, so gossamer fine that it was less a sound than a thought, the ringing of snow crystal on snow crystal as the feathery flakes touched and separated in the frost-keen air. It surely was there and the beech trees heard it and stood breathless in solemn joy at the sound.

This is my third in an extensive number of nature books by Winthrop Packard (1862-1943) of Canton, Massachusetts. This is an example, too, of the need to read many books by the same author, if possible. The first two left me somewhat disenchanted with his nature sketches. But in Wildwood Ways, the enchantment is evident on every page. There is magic here, but always out of the corner of the eye, just beyond reach. Often, as in the passage above, it is a magic of sounds and silences. For all that Packard grounds his winter vignettes in scientific knowledge, he never quite discounts alternative explanations, ways of encountering nature rooted in myth and folklore. Yes, he seems to say, there is a scientific explanation here. But maybe, just maybe, there is more — wonder, beauty, awe. There is the way things are on the surface, and then something deeper — whisperings of trees, reflections of cosmic mysteries. His finest moments, without a doubt, are in an essay entitled “Thin Ice”. I will share the first portion below. The nebular hypothesis is the most widely-accepted explanation for the origin of our solar system; it was first proposed by in 1755 by the German philosopher Immanuel Kant.

Toward midnight the pond fell asleep. All day long it had frolicked with the boisterous north wind, pretending to frown and turn black in the face when the cold shoulders of the gale bore down upon its surface, dimpling as the pressure left it and sparkling in brilliant glee as the low hung sun laughed across its ruffles. The wind went down with the sun, as north winds often do, and left a clear mirror stretching from shore to shore, and reflecting the cold yellow of the winter twilight.

As this chill twilight iced into the frozen purple of dusk, tremulous stars quivered into being out of the violet blackness of space. The nebular hypothesis is born again in the heavens each still winter night. It must have slipped thence into the mind of Kant as he stood in the growing dusk of some German December watching the violet-gray frost vapors of the frozen sky condense into the liquid radiance of early starlight, then tremble again into the crystalline glints of unknown suns whirling in majestic array through the full night along the myriad miles of interstellar space.

Standing on the water’s edge on such a night you realize that you are the very centre of a vast scintillating universe, for the stars shine with equal glory beneath your feet and above your head. The earth is forgotten. It has become transparent, and where before sunset gray sand lay beneath a half-inch of water at your toe-tips, you now gaze downward through infinite space to the nadir, the unchartered, unfathomable distance checked off every thousand million miles or so by unnamed constellations that blur into a milky way beneath your feet. The pond is very deep on still winter nights.

If you will take canoe and glide out into the centre the illusion is complete. There is no more earth nor do the waters under the earth remain; you float in the void of space with the Pleiades for your nearest neighbor and the pole star your only surety. In such situations only can you feel the full loom of the universe. The molecular theory is there stated with yourself as the one molecule at the centre of incomputability. It is a relief to shatter all this with a stroke of the paddle, shivering all the lower half of your incomputable universe into a quivering chaos, and as the shore looms black and uncertain in the bitter chill it is nevertheless good to see, for it is the homely earth coming back to you. You have had your last canoe trip of the year, but it has carried you far.

No wonder that on such a night the pond, falling asleep for the long winter, dreams. A little after midnight it stirred uneasily in its sleep and a faint quiver ran across its surface. A laggard puff of the north wind that, straggling, had itself fallen asleep in the pine wood and waked again, was now hastening to catch up. The surface water had been below the freezing point for some time and with the slight wakening the dreams began to write themselves all along as if the little puff of wind were a pencil that drew the unformulated thoughts in ice crystals. Water lying absolutely still will often do this. Its temperature may go some degrees below the freezing point and it will still be unchanged. Stir it faintly and the ice crystals grow across it at the touch.

Strange to tell, too, the pond’s dreams at first were not of the vast universe that lay hollowed out beneath the sky and was repeated to the eye in its clear depths. Its dreams were of earth and warmth, of vaporous days and humid nights when never a frost chill touched its surface the long year through, and the record the little wind wrote in the ice crystals was of the growth of fern frond and palm and prehistoric plant life that grew in tropic luxuriance in the days when the pond was young.

These first bold, free-hand sketches touched crystal to crystal and joined, embossing a strange network of arabesques, plants drawn faithfully, animals of the coal age sketched in and suggested only, while all among the figures great and small was the plaided level of open water. This solidified, dreamless, about and under the decorations, and the pond was frozen in from shore to shore. Thus I found it the next morning, level and black under one of those sunrises which seem to shatter the great crystal of the still atmosphere into prisms. The cold has been frozen out of the sky, and in its place remains some strange vivific principle which is like an essence of immortality.

I close my eyes and I can imagine myself in that canoe, adrift in the cosmic ocean. Are the stars below me merely reflections, or has the Earth vanished? A brief motion of my paddle in the water grounds me again. But was what I experienced all smoke and mirrors, or was I glimpsing an underlying cosmic reality?

In other places, throughout the book, Packard evokes giants and goblins. I am confident he does not seriously consider their existence; rather, I suspect that they are stand-ins for the wonder and magic we can find in nature. They represent missing pieces of the story, ones science has not revealed to us — and possibly never will. Consider this encounter with the sounds made by an iced-over lake in the dead of winter:

In the whirligig of our New England winter weather the soft rain and strong south wind passed. Then the wind blew strong from the northwest and fair skies and low temperature prevailed for some days, welding the erstwhile softened ice into an elastic surface as resonant as tempered steel. Then came a still warm day in which we had the same increase of temperature under springlike skies as on that previous day. Yet the pond never uttered a word—audible to my listening human ears. Here were the conditions like those of the other message period, yet not a word was said. Even the soft haze which presaged another south blow filled the sky, so apparently nothing was wanted but the voice at the other end of the line. It was along in the evening that I heard the first call, followed rapidly by a great uproar, so that people heard it in their houses half a mile or more away. Immediately I looked up the thermometer. The temperature had not changed a degree for hours. Yet here were the primal forces telephoning back and forth to one another and fairly making the welkin ring with their hubbub. Surely wires were crossed somewhere on the ether waves, or else the tempers of the primal forces themselves were out of sorts.

I seemed to hear familiar words in their roarings, admonitions to get farther away from the transmitter, requests for strangers to get off the line and other little courtesies that pass current in the telephone booth; and so for a half-hour they kept it up. It was all very ghostly and disquieting and savoring of the superhuman to listen to it in the night and wonder what it was all about. At last one or the other giant hung up the receiver with a tremendous bang, and nothing more was to be heard but the mutterings of the other, grumbling about it in notes low and tremendously deep.

Before morning the wind was blowing a wild gale from the south, rain was pouring in torrents and we were evidently on the outer edge of a winter hurricane that had been well up the coast, perhaps as far as Nantucket, when the pond began to talk about it. No; I do not think changes in temperature have much to do with it. My explanation for the scientist is that these noises begin with a drop in the atmospheric pressure, a region of low barometer moving up in advance of the storm. Taking the pressure quite suddenly off the ice would start all the air imprisoned in solution beneath it to pushing upward for a chance to get away. No wonder it groans and whoops with all that wind in its wame.

But privately I am not so sure. We have so many sure-thing theories, and so much definite knowledge to-day that to-morrow is all discredited and cast aside leaving us groping for another theory, that it is just as easy to believe myself eavesdropping at telephone talk between giants. That particular night it sounded to me like Hercules on his way up from Hades with Cerberus under his arm and a bit over-anxious lest the deities fail to have the dog pound ready for him on arrival in the upper regions—but of course that’s pagan myth.

“But of course that’s pagan myth.” But what does Packard really mean by this offhand remark? Is he asserting that the myth is nothing more than the silly imaginings of a bygone age, and ought to be discarded? Or is he instead with irony, echoing those around him while recognizing that the myths of the distant past offer other ways of seeing and describing the world around us? Certainly, Packard does not settle easily for the humdrum and quotidian. In one humorous section, he disparages a settler whose imagination extended no further than naming a small water body “Muddy Pond”:

The gravelly ridges of the woodland I tramped as I faced the golden sun again are singularly like waves of the sea. They roll here and rise to toppling pinnacles there and tumble about in a confusion that seems at once inextricable and as if it had in it some rude but unfathomed order. Surely as at sea every seventh wave is the highest; or is it the ninth, or the third? Just as at sea, the horizon is by no means a level line. Wave-strewn ridges shoulder up into it and now and then a peak lifts that is a cumulation of waves all rushing toward a common center through some obscure prompting of the surface pulsations. Sometimes at sea your ship rises on one of these aggregations of waves and you see yawning in front of it a veritable gulf; or the ship slips down into this gulf and the toppling pinnacle whelms it and the captain reports a tidal wave to the hydrographic office, if he is fortunate enough to reach it. So along my route southward the terminal and lateral moraines, drumlins, and kames rolled and toppled and leapt upward till they had swung me to a pinnacled ridge whence I looked down into a stanza from the Idylls of the King. Along a way like this once rode scornful and petulant Lynette, followed by great-hearted Gareth, newly knighted, on his first quest;

“Then, after one long slope was mounted, saw

Bowl-shaped, through tops of many thousand pines

A gloomy-gladed hollow slowly sink

To westward—in the deeps whereof a mere,

Round as the red eye of an eagle owl

Under the half-dead sunset glared;—”

That is the way Tennyson saw it, and the counterpart of the gulf, out of which looked the round-eyed mere, lay at my feet. Long years ago some first settler, lacking certainly Tennyson’s outlook, stupidly cognizant only of the worst that his prodding pole could stir up, named the wee gem of a lake “Muddy Pond.” Here surely was another man with eyes and no eyes. Round the margin’s lip, summer and winter, rolls the bronze green sphagnum, its delicate tips simulating shaggy forest growth of hoary pine and fir. Nestling in its gray-gold heart are the delicate pink wonder-orchids of late May, the callopogon and arethusa. Here the pitcher plant holds its purple-veined cups to the summer rain and traps the insects that slide down its velvety lip and may not climb again against this same velvet, become suddenly a spiny chevaux-de-frise. All about are set the wickets of the bog-hobble, the Nesæa verticillata, which in July will blossom into pink-purple flags—decorations, I dare say, of wood-goblins who play at cricket here on the soft turf of a midsummer-night’s tournament.

Of a summer day this tiny bowl is a mile-deep sapphire, holding the sky in its heart. When thunder clouds hang threatening over it, it is a black pearl with evanescent gleams of silver playing in its calm depths; and always the dense green of the swamp cedars that rim its golden bog-edge round are a setting of Alexandrite stone such as they mine in the heart of the Ceylon mountains, decked with lighter pencilings of chrysoprase and beryl. And some man, looking upon all this, saw only the mud beneath it! Probably he trotted the bog and only knew the wickets of the Nesæa verticillata were there because they tripped him. And I’ll warrant the goblins, sitting cross-legged in the deepest shadows of the cedars, waiting for midnight and their game, mocked him with elfin laughter—and all he heard was frogs.

For Packard, nature beckons us to engage with it through not only our physical senses but also our active imagination. He taps into myths and folktales to evoke landscapes in one chapter; in another, on a winter walk, he imagines himself made invisible by the snow; unseen, he observes the comical strutting of a ruffed grouse:

In woodland pathways where the trees were large enough on either side so that they did not bend beneath the snow and obstruct, all passage was noiseless; amongst shrubs and slender saplings it was almost impossible. The bent withes hobbled you, caught you breast high and hurled you back with elastic but unyielding force, throttled you and drowned you in avalanches of smothering white. To attempt to penetrate the thicket was like plunging into soft drifts where in the blinding white twilight you found yourself inexplicably held back by steel-like but invisible bonds, drifts where you felt the shivery touch of the cold fingers of winter magic changing you into a veritable snow man, and as such you emerged. It was more than baptism, it was total immersion, you were initiated into the order of the white woods and not even your heel was vulnerable…

Thus panoplied in white magic, my snowshoes making no sound on the fluffy floor of woodland paths, I felt that I might stalk invisible and unheeded in the wilderness world. The fern-seed of frost fronds had fallen upon my head in fairy grottos built by magic in a night. These had not been there before, they would not be there to-morrow. To-morrow, too, the magic might be gone, but for to-day I was to feel the chill joy of it.

A ruffed grouse was the first woodland creature not to see me. I stalked around a white corner almost upon him and stood poised while he continued to weave his starry necklaces of footprints in festoons about the butts of scrubby oaks and wild-cherry shrubs. He too was barred from the denser tangle which he might wish to penetrate. He did not seem to be seeking food. Seemingly there was nothing under the scrub oaks that he could get. It was more as if, having breakfasted well, he now walked in meditation for a little, before starting in on the serious business of the day. He too was wearing his snowshoes, and they held him up in the soft snow fully as well as mine supported me. His feet that had been bare in autumn now had grown quills which helped support his weight but did not take away from the clean-cut, star-shaped impression of the toes. Rather they made lesser points between these four greater ones and added to the star-like appearance of the tracks.

I knew him for a male bird by the broad tufts of glossy black feathers with which his neck was adorned. It was the first week in February, but then Saint Valentine’s day comes on the fourteenth, and on this day, as all folklore—which right or wrong we must perforce believe—informs us, the birds choose their mates. My cock partridge must have been planning a love sonnet, weaving rhymes as he wove his trail in rhythmic curves that coquetted with one another as rhymes do. His head nodded the rhythm as his feet fell in the proper places. Now and then he bent forward in his walk as one does in deep meditation. If he had hands they would have been clasped behind his back when in this attitude, as his wings were. Again he lifted his head high, fluffed out those glossy black neck feathers and strutted. Here surely was a fine phrase that would reach the waiting heart of that mottled brown hen that was now quietly keeping by herself in some secluded corner of the wood. The thought threw out his chest, and those tail feathers that had folded slimly as he walked in pensive meditation spread and cocked fan-shaped. I half expected him to open his strong, pointed bill and gobble as a turkey does under similar circumstances. The demure placing of star after star in that necklace trail was broken by a little fantastic pas seul, from which he dropped suddenly on both feet, vaulted into the air, and whirred away down arcades of snowy whiteness and vanished. I don’t think he saw me. He was rushing to find the lady and recite that poem to her before he forgot it.

I could continue with even more passages from this small book. It has rekindled my desire to produce an anthology of these lesser-known nature writers. Certainly, my enthusiasm for reading additional works by Packard has been renewed by my encounter with his evocations of a Massachusetts winter — despite all that I have already read by so many others in a similar vein.

My copy of this volume bears a signature on the front endpaper: M.E. Webber, February 11, 1925. Unfortunately, without a first name or location, who this was will remain a mystery. All pages were free, so I can at least assume that he (or she) read the book before me.

Never Has a Springtime Been So Welcome to Me: “A Woman Who Went to Alaska” by May Kellogg Sullivan (1903)

 Birds, Environmental conservation, Sense of Place  No Responses »
Aug 152022
 

May Kellogg Sullivan’s exultation over the coming of spring to northern Alaska is matched by my own notebook comment regarding the same page — “Nature, at last!”. It is page 354 of a book with 392 pages, and it is one of the first (and precious few) passages where Sullivan contributes a few words of description of the natural world. Throughout much of the book, it is the Arctic winter, and Sullivan passes her days knitting clothes for Eskimo children at a mission. Nearly all of the animals she mentions in the book take the form of pelts. For instance, a red fox pelt figures prominently; she had bought it to add to her winter gear, only to have it stolen by one of the several bad elements she encountered during her time in the far north. Her first encounter with a ptarmigan is one that was caught in a trap and was trussed up to be served at dinner.

To be completely fair, the book was a mostly enjoyable read (though the winter knitting scenes did get tedious); it only fails completely when evaluated as a nature book. One thing I learned from reading his volume, and the previous one by Frederick Schwatka, is that a journey to a wild place does not automatically constitute nature writing. May Kellogg Sullivan was not, as far as I can tell, a naturalist of any kind. Her trip to Alaska appears to have been motivated by a quest for gold coupled with some level of interest in adventure. Only once does a proclivity for nature study appear in the work — on page 354. Here it is, in its entirety. Molly was the native wife of the Mission director (called the Captain); Jennie was her semi-invalid daughter.

The last week of May has finally come, and with it real spring weather. The children play out in the sand heap on the south side of the house for hours together, enjoying the warm sunshine and pleasant air, the little girl clothed from head to foot in furs. Never has a springtime been so welcome to me, perhaps because in striking contrast to the long, cold winter through which we have just passed. From the hillside behind the Mission, the snow is slowly disappearing, first from the most exposed spots and rocks, the gullies keeping their drifts and ice longer. Mosses are everywhere peeping cheerfully up at me in all their tints of gorgeous green, some that I found recently being tipped with the daintiest of little red cups. This, with other treasures, I brought in my basket to Jennie when I returned from my daily walk upon the hill, and together we studied them closely under the magnifying glass.

To examine the treasures brought in by Mollie, however, we needed no glass. They are sand-pipers, ptarmigan, squirrels, and occasionally a wild goose, shot, perhaps, in the act of flying over the hunter’s head, as these birds are now often seen and heard going north. In the evening I see from my window the neighboring Eskimo children playing with their sleds, and sometimes they light a bonfire, shouting and chattering in their own unique way. All “mushers” now travel at night when the trail is frozen, as it is too soft in the daytime, and the glare of the sun often causes snow-blindness. Then, too, there is water on the ice in places, which we are glad to see, and pools of the same are standing around the Mission and schoolhouse. I can no longer go out in my muckluks, but must wear my long rubber boots and short skirts.

Today I went out for an hour, walking to Chinik Creek over the tundra, from which the snow has almost disappeared, and returned by the hill-top path. The tundra was beautiful with mosses, birds were singing, and the rushing and roaring of the creek waters fairly made my head swim, they were such unusual sounds. The water was cutting a channel in the sands where it empties into the bay. Here it was flowing over the ice, helping to loosen the edge and allow it to drift out to sea.

It is, on the whole, a charming springtime tundra scene, though the particular species of birds and mosses are, of course, not provided. How I longed for Sullivan to set out across the tundra and have adventures amongst the various animals of the north — though I suppose the hazard of polar bears would rather discourage that kind of behavior. I struggled throughout the book with wanting it to be what it clearly wasn’t. Where it shines, actually, is in documenting the gritty realities of life in gold rush communities of tents and shacks. Her time in Alaska was chiefly spent in such places, where the thirst for gold was causing considerable environmental harm (which was, of course, overlooked by all). Sullivan’s Kodak camera documents the damage, though.

And yes, this is the Nome gold rush. I had never heard of it before.

Sullivan herself is a bit of a mystery. I know that she visited Alaska twice over 18 months in 1899-1900, covering over 12,000 miles in her solo travels. She was evidently married at the time but says absolutely nothing about her husband. Were they estranged? Was he deceased? And I have no birth or death dates for Sullivan. She does mention that she is a native of the Badger State, a.k.a., Wisconsin.

I will close out my post with another all-too-brief nature scene, this one from the Arctic summer, soon after Kellogg arrived in Nome (where she got a job in a tent restaurant since women were not permitted to participate in the actual mining work). It is tacked onto a picture of the burgeoning mining camp:

To eyes so unaccustomed as ours to the sight, how strange it all looked at midnight. From the big tent door which faced south and towards Nome City we could see the blue waters of Behring Sea away in the distance. Great ships lying there at anchor, lately arrived from the outside world or just about to leave, laden with treasure, at this long range looked like mere dots on the horizon. Between them and us there straggled over the beach in a westerly direction, a confused group of objects we well knew to be the famous and fast growing camp on the yellow sands. To our right, as well as our left, rolled the softly undulating hills, glowing in tender tints of purples and greys, or, if the moon hung low above our heads, there were warmer and lighter shades which were doubly entrancing.

Accompanying the low moon twinkled the silver stars with their olden time coyness of expression. Little birds, not knowing when to sleep in the endless daylight, hopped among the dewy wild flowers of the tundra, calling to their mates or nestlings, twittering a song appropriate to the time and place because entirely unfamiliar.

My copy of this book is a later edition, from 1915. According to the title page, it is part of the “Thirteenth Thousand” of Kellogg’s work. Given the book’s clear sales success, I am surprised that so little information is available online about its author.

For White Men’s Purposes: “A Summer in Alaska: A Popular Account of the Travels of an Alaska Exploring Expedition Along the Great Yukon River, from Its Source to Its Mouth, in the British North-West Territory, and in the Territory of Alaska ” by Frederick Schwatka (1892)

 book review, Books, Environmental conservation, Natural History, Sense of Place  1 Response »
Aug 052022
 

These Eskimos had been hired on the Lower Yukon, and but for their being a little more stolid and homely than those of north Hudson’s Bay, I should have thought myself back among the tribes of that region. They make better and more tractable workmen than any of the Indians along the river, and in many other ways are superior to the latter for the white men’s purposes, being more honest, ingenious and clever in the use of tools, while treachery is an unknown element in their character.

The transition from a “standard-issue nature book” to an explorer’s narrative came as quite a shock to me. Alaska was the rugged West in 1885, a wild country with boundless resources to be identified and exploited. Schwtka eyes everything around him in terms of potential use, from forests to native peoples. The only moment the modern reader glimpses a different future for Alaska in this account is in a passing mention of the Muir Glacier, discovered by John Muir during his own 1879 expedition (to be covered in a future blog post). Although he had evidenced an aptitude for natural history during his time at the US Military Academy, Schwatka was a military officer first and foremost and saw the landscape and objects in it in largely utilitarian terms.

In this particular expedition, Schwatka commanded a truly low-budget, under-the-radar journey from the headwaters of the Yukon River almost 2000 miles to its mouth, mostly by raft. But whereas John Wesley Powell’s thousand-mile journey down the Green and Colorado Rivers through the Grand Canyon is widely celebrated today, who has even heard of Schwatka? For all its length, his expedition was virtually free of rapids; instead, it was the gnats and mosquitoes that posed the greatest danger. There are no grand dramatic moments in this account. In terms of advancing the cause of natural science, Schwatka did gather some herbarium specimens at the beginning of the trip, and he includes a few descriptions of wild animal encounters in this book. But for the most part, wildlife was there to be shot at (fortunately, as his comments frequently show, expedition members tended to aim poorly). Birds might be pleasant to observe, but there was always the possibility that they could be good for eating, too (or not):

Everywhere we came in contact with the grouse of these regions, all of them with broods of varying numbers, and while the little chicks went scurrying through the grass and brush in search of a hiding place, the old ones walked along in front of the intruder, often but a few feet away, seemingly less devoid of fear than the common barn fowls, although probably they had never heard a shot fired.

The Doctor and I sat down to rest on a large rock with a perturbed mother grouse on another not over three yards away, and we could inspect her plumage and study her actions as well as if she had been in a cage. The temptation to kill them was very great after having been so long without fresh meat, a subsistence the appetite loudly demands in the rough out-of-door life of an explorer. A mess of them ruthlessly destroyed by our Indian hunters, who had no fears of the game law, no sportsman’s qualms of conscience, nor in fact compassion of any sort, lowered our desire to zero, for they were tougher than leather, and as tasteless as shavings; and after that first mess we were perfectly willing to allow them all the rights guaranteed by the game laws of lower latitudes.

Fortunately (in my opinion), most of the animals observed on the journey survived. Grizzlies fared quite well, as even the natives of the region tended to avoid hunting them, as Schwatka explains:

Everywhere in his dismal dominions [the grizzly bear] is religiously avoided by the native Nimrod, who declares that his meat is not fit to be eaten, that his robe is almost worthless, and that he constantly keeps the wrong end presented to his pursuers. Although he is never hunted encounters with him are not altogether unknown, as he is savage enough to become the hunter himself at times, and over some routes the Indians will never travel unless armed so as to be fairly protected from this big Bruin.

(As a side note, for all of Schwatka’s condescension toward the natives, I am fairly confident that by Nimrod, he means to label the Indian as a skillful hunter, not as a dimwitted or stupid person. The more insulting use of the word did not appear in text until 1932.)

The attribute of this narrative that stands out the most is its length. It is over 400 pages, and most of the time, the expedition members are struggling downstream on the very wide and often quite braided Yukon River, trying to keep the raft off the sand bars and moving downstream. This is occasionally interrupted by visits to native villages along the shoreline, typically described as squalid affairs consisting of a few shacks (often untenanted, since the Indians were semi-nomadic and did not occupy most locations for extended periods of time). Mosquitoes are mentioned on nearly every page, and gnats put in appearances too, along with one particularly vicious horsefly. Expeditions by foot into the adjacent forest and mountains are rare, since they inevitably resulted in encounters with brutal clouds of biting insects. Those readers seeking an armchair vacation in paradise had best look elsewhere; backcountry Alaska definitely does not conform to Mabie’s transcendental visions of Eden. Here is what a coastal forest walk (prior to the Yukon raft journey) was like for Schwatka; for once, the hazards aren’t insects, but topography and climate:

To turn inland from the shore was at once to commence the ascent of a slope that might vary frcm forty to eighty degrees, the climbing of which almost beggars description. The compact mass of evergreen timber had looked dense enough from the ship, but at its feet grew a denser mass of tangled undergrowth of bushes and vines, and at their roots again was a solid carpeting of moss, lichens, and ferns that often ran up the trees and underbrush for heights greater than a man’s reach, and all of it moist as a sponge, the whole being absolutely tropical in luxuriance. This thick carpet of moss extends from the shore line to the edges of the glaciers on the mountain summits, and the constant melting of the ice through the warm summer supplies it with water which it absorbs like a sponge… It is almost impossible to conceive how heavily laden with tropical moisture the atmos- phere is in this supposed sub-Arctic colony of ours. It oozes up around your feet as you walk, and drips from overhead like an April mist, and nothing is exempt from it. Even the Indians’ tall, dead ” totem-poles” of hemlock or spruce, which would make fine kindling wood any where else, bear huge clumps of dripping moss and foliage on their tops, at heights varying from ten to thirty feet above the ground. An occasional stray seed of a Sitka spruce may get caught in this elevated tangle, and make its home there just as well as if it were on the ground. It sprouts, and as its branches run up in the air, the roots crawl down the “totem-pole ” until the ground is reached, when they bury themselves in it, and send up fresh sustenance to the trunk and limbs, which until then have been living a parasitic sort of life off the decayed moss… Imagine a city boy tossing a walnut from a fourth story window, and its lodging on top of a telegraph pole, there sprouting next spring, and in the course of a couple of years extending its roots down the pole, insinuating themselves in the crevices and splitting it open, then piercing the pavement; the tree continuing to grow for years until the boy, as a man, can reach out from his window and pick walnuts every fall, and the idea seems incredible ; and yet the equivalent occurs quite often in the south-eastern portions of our distant colony. Nor is all this marshy softness confined to the levels or to almost level slopes, as one would imagine from one’s experience at home, but it extends up the steepest places, where the climbing would be hard enough without this added obstacle. In precipitous slopes where the foot tears out a great swath of moist moss, it may reveal underneath a slippery shingle or shale where nothing but a bird could find a footing in its present condition. There is wonderful preservative power in all these conditions, for nothing seems to rot in the ground, and the accumulated timber of ages, standing and fallen, stumps, limbs, and trunks, “criss-cross and tumble-tangled,” as the children say, forms a bewildering mass which, covered and intertwined as it is with a compact entanglement of underbrush and moss, makes the ascent of the steep hillsides a formidable undertaking. A fallen trunk of a tree is only indicated by a ridge of moss, and should the traveler on this narrow path deviate a little too far to the right or left, he may sink up to his arm-pits in a soft mossy trap from which he can scramble as best he may, according to his activity in the craft of “backwoodsmanship.” Having once reached the tops of the lower hills — the higher ones are covered with snow and glacier ice the year round — a few small openings may be seen, which, if anything, are more boggy and treacherous to the feet than the hillsides themselves, lagoon-like morasses, covered with pond lilies and aquatic plant life, being connected by a network of sluggish canals with three or four inches of amber colored water and as many feet of soft black oozy mud, with here and there a clump of willow brake or “pussy-tails” springing above the waste of sedge and flags.

While Schwatka doesn’t exult in nature like Muir or even celebrate the rich biodiversity of the temperate rainforest ecosystem, he does a robust job of describing the scene, and for those moments, I am grateful to have read this book. And here, in whimsically describing a moose, he even goes so far as to wish the species well, though he naturally refers to it as “noble game”:

While descending the stream on the 24th, late in the forenoon, we saw a large buck moose swim from one of the many islands to the mainland just back of us, having probably, as the hunter would say, “gotten our scent.” I never comprehended what immense noses these animals have until I got a good profile view of this big fellow, and although over half a mile away, his nose looked as if he had been rooting the island and was trying to carry away the greater part of it on the end of his snout. The great palmated horns above, the broad “throat-latch” before, combined with the huge nose and powerful shoulders, make one think that this animal might tilt forward on his head from sheer gravity, so little is there apparently at the other end to counterbalance these masses… A few winters ago the cold was so intense, and the snow covered the ground for so great a depth throughout the season, that sad havoc was played with the unfortunate animals, and a moose is now a rare sight below the upper ramparts of the river, as I was informed by the traders of that district. It is certainly to be hoped that the destruction has only been partial, so that this noble game may again flourish in its home, where it will be secure from the inroads of firearms for many decades to come.

As evident in this description of a moose, there is a charmingly comedic edge to this book. Schwatka has a delightfully wry sense of humor, though it is often directed toward the natives he encounters. Here, he conveys a sense of what the interiors of the Indian dwellings were like: “The vast majority of the houses are squalid beyond measure, and the dense resinous smoke of the spruce and pine blackens the walls with a funereal tinge, and fills the house with an odor which, when mingled with that of decayed salmon, makes one feel like leaving his card at the door and passing on.” And here are his thoughts about dried salmon as a food source:

This [Indian] house was deserted, but evidently only for a while, as a great deal of its owner’s material of the chase and the fishery was still to be seen hanging inside on the rafters. Among these were a great number of dried salmon, one of the staple articles of food that now begin to appear on this part of the great river, nearly two thousand miles from its mouth. This salmon, when dried before putrefaction sets in, is tolerable, ranking somewhere between Limburger cheese and walrus hide. Collecting some of it occasionally from Indian fishermen as we floated by, we would use it as a lunch in homeopathic quantities until some of us got so far as to imagine that we really liked it.

Ultimately, though, this book casts a long shadow as a work of Western imperialism. Throughout their odyssey, Schwatka and his men pass rivers, cross lakes, and view distant mountains that all most likely have native names. But rather than seeking them out to add to the map, Schwatka draws from an endless well of European scientists and statesmen to furnish new ones. And it is difficult to overlook his disdain for the native peoples of Alaska. Consider this passage about those in the southeastern part of the territory:

The progress of the natives of Southeastern Alaska toward civilization is steady and certain, though it must not be supposed that these people yet take high rank in learning, intelligence or morality. The educating and elevating influences of the schools and missions, though doing much, perhaps more than we should expect under the circumstances, must be continued a long time in order to effect anything like satisfactory conditions.

Reading this book has been particularly helpful to me as I continue to explore American nature writing. I feel comfortable saying that, while nature is present in it, this is not in that category. Perhaps the line might be drawn at books of exploration written by naturalists, such as William Beebe, books that focus on nature first and foremost. All I know is that if I expand this blog to encompass more works like this one, I will have thousands of titles yet to read, instead of merely hundreds.

This will be my first in a pair of posts about Alaska; the next blog post will feature a title recommended to me by the renowned environmental historian, Ralph Lutts (who has so kindly been guiding more toward further titles and resources, much to my wife’s dismay and my bank account’s suffering). I anticipate there will be more in the future — at some point, I will be reading Muir’s travels in Alaska, as well.

As a postscript, while my copy of this book is from 1894, it was first published in 1892, the year of Schwatka’s untimely death at the age of 43. One newspaper reported that he died of an accidental overdose of morphine, while another paper claimed it was suicide by laudanum. The true cause of his death has never been resolved.

Afoot and in the Open Road: “Winter Sunshine” by John Burroughs (1875)

 book review, Books, Natural History, Sense of Place  No Responses »
Jul 282022
 

Four years elapsed between Burroughs’ first book of nature essays, Wake Robin, and his second collection, Winter Sunshine. During that time, Burroughs moved back home to New York State (January 1873) and a year later, purchased 9 acres in West Park, where he built his estate, Riverby. The Hudson Valley would be his home base for the remainder of his days, and out of its soil would emerge his finest writing. But not yet.

Winter Sunshine documents Burroughs’ rambling journey toward finding his voice, his roots, his place. It is a work of transition, and as such, not one of his strongest achievements, but vital to understanding how Burroughs would one day become “the Seer of Slabsides”. One of the first essays in the book, “The Exhilarations of the Road”, is a celebration of the nomadic life; a young and brash Burroughs longs to travel the world. “I think how much richer and firmer-grained life would be to me if I could journey afoot through Florida and Texas, or follow the windings of the Platte or the Yellow- stone, or stroll through Oregon, or browse for a season about Canada,” Burroughs announces. Indeed, most of the second half of the book is taken up with his impressions from a multi-week trip to England, France, and Ireland. His remaining essays are split between the Washington, D.C. area and upstate New York. Repeatedly, too, Burroughs makes comparisons between England and the United States in terms of culture and landscape. For instance, he contrasts the British love for walking and footpaths with the relative dearth of both back home. Birds, central to Wake Robin, rarely appear. Instead, Burroughs devotes an essay to all the animals leaving tracks in the snow during a Hudson River Valley winter — mostly mammals.

Another essay in the collection is a paean to the pleasures of apples. It is telling, I think, that Thoreau wrote an essay on “Wild Apples” while Burroughs emphasizes the more domesticated variety. Thoreau sought to keep a foot planted firmly in the wild and a foot in civilization; Burroughs places both feet firmly in the rural landscape that blends elements of both. Burroughs ends his essay by speaking of Thoreau’s work:

…the cow is the friend of the apple. How many trees she has planted about the farm, in the edge of the woods, and in remote fields and pastures! The wild apples, celebrated by Thoreau, are mostly of her planting….

I have alluded to Thoreau, to whom all lovers of the apple and its tree are under obligation. His chapter on Wild Apples is a most delicious piece of writing. It has a ‘tang and smack” like the fruit it celebrates, and is dashed and streaked with color in the same manner. It has the hue and perfume of the crab, and the richness and raciness of the pippin. But Thoreau loved other apples than the wild sorts, and was obliged to confess that his favorites could not be eaten indoors.

At some moments in the book, Burroughs seems to copy Thoreau in topic and outlook. For instance, Burroughs remarks early on about how he, like Thoreau, feels naturally drawn to the west on his walks. Thoreau also frequently explored how human beings are in sympathy with the forms and patterns of nature, including the journey of the seasons. When I first read the passage below from Burroughs’ essay, “Autumn Tides”, I could imagine it appearing somewhere in Thoreau’s Journal:

Does not the human frame yield to and sympathize with the seasons? Are there not more births in the spring and more deaths in the fall? In the spring one vegetates; his thoughts turn to sap; another kind of activity seizes him; he makes new wood which does not harden till past midsummer. For my part, I find all literary work irksome from April to August; my sympathies run in other channels; the grass grows where meditation walked. As fall approaches, the currents mount to the head again. But my thoughts do not ripen well till after there has been a frost. The burrs will not open much before that. A man’s thinking, I take it, is a kind of combustion, as is the ripening of fruits and leaves, and he wants plenty of oxygen in the air.

Literary work isn’t the only irksome thing to Burroughs during the summer months. Here, in quite a different tone, is his disdainful description of Washington D.C. at that time of year:

Think of the agonies of the heated term, the ragings of the dog-star, the purgatory of heat and dust, of baking, blistering pavements, of cracked and powdered fields, of dead, stifling night air, from which every tonic and antiseptic quality seems eliminated, leaving a residuum of sultry malaria and all-diffusing privy and sewer gases, that lasts from the first of July to near the middle of September!

Much of the book is filled with hasty generalizations about other races and cultures, not all of which are to Burroughs’ credit. These are not his finest pages — ones where he seeks to figure out the British, the Irish, the French, and colored people. Here are his observations on the latter, from the eponymous essay that opens the collection:

In my walks about Washington, both winter and summer, colored men are about the only pedestrians I meet; and I meet them everywhere, in the fields and in the woods and in the public road, swinging along with that peculiar, rambling, elastic gait, taking advantage of the short cuts and threading the country with paths and byways. I doubt if the colored man can compete with his white brother as walker; his foot is too flat and the calves of his legs too small, but he is certainly the most picturesque traveler to be seen on the road. He bends his knees more than the white man, and oscillates more to and fro, or from side to side. The imaginary line which his head describes is full of deep and long undulations. Even the boys and young men sway as if bearing a burden.

Along the fences and by the woods I come upon their snares, dead-falls, and rude box-traps. The freedman is a successful trapper and hunter, and has by nature an insight into these things. I frequently see him in market or on his way thither with a tame ’possum clinging timidly to his shoulders, or a young coon or fox led by a chain. Indeed, the colored man behaves precisely like the rude unsophisticated peasant that he is, and there is fully as much virtue in him, using the word in its true sense, as in the white peasant; indeed, much more than in the poor whites who grew up by his side; while there is often a benignity and a depth of human experience and sympathy about some of these dark faces that comes home to one like the best one sees in art or reads in books.

One touch of nature makes all the world akin, and there is certainly a touch of nature about the colored man; indeed, I had almost said, of Anglo-Saxon nature. They have the quaintness and homeliness of the simple English stock.

But Burroughs saves his most cringe-worthy descriptive passage for his brief stay in Ireland:

I hardly know why I went to Ireland, except it was to indulge the few drops of Irish blood in my veins, and maybe also with a view to shorten my sea voyage by a day. I also felt a desire to see one or two literary men there, and in this sense my journey was eminently gratifying; but so far from shortening my voyage by a day, it lengthened it by three days, that being the time it took me to recover from the effects of it; and as to the tie of blood, I think it must nearly all have run out, for I felt but few congenital throbs while in Ireland.

The Englishman at home is a much more lovable animal than the Englishman abroad, but Pat in Ireland is even more of a pig than in this country. Indeed, the squalor and poverty, and cold, skinny wretchedness one sees in Ireland, and (what freezes our sympathies) the groveling, swiny shiftlessness that pervades these hovels, no traveler can be prepared for. It is the bare prose of misery, the unheroic of tragedy. There is not one redeeming or mitigating feature.

Burroughs would gain his fame by inhabiting one corner of the world and studying it passionately and thoughtfully. But in these early days of his literary career, he shows what harm might be done by quick judgment and rash generalizations about the world. It is an object lesson for all of us, I think.

Just as Burroughs struggled to find his voice, so, too, did nature writers in America during the 1870s. As of now, having read over 60 titles, I can report that only three of them date to this decade: Among the Isles of Shoals by Celia Thaxter (1873), this work, and Into the Wilderness by Charles Dudley Warner (1878). Including 1880 and 1881 adds Friends Worth Knowing by Ernest Ingersoll (1880) and The Diary of a Bird by H. D. Minot (1880). For reasons I can only speculate about at this point, the two decades following Thoreau’s death in 1861 marked a relative dry spell for the nature genre in America, before a flood of writers would emerge during the “Nature Movement” (as Sharp called it) in the three decades that followed.

The Secrets of Field and Wood: “Field-Farings: A Vagrant Chronicle of Earth and Sky” by Martha McCulloch-Williams (1892)

 Agriculture and Husbandry, Birds, book review, Books, Native Plants, Sense of Place  1 Response »
Jul 252022
 

I do not know quite what to make of this book, its rather pretentious title, or its somewhat enigmatic author. I am not even clear that it qualifies as a “nature book”, though it is rich in bucolic scenes of flowering plants and singing birds. I suppose I will share what I know, and let readers figure out the rest on their own.

What is known about the author is that Martha McCulloch-Williams was born near Clarksville, northwest Tennessee, in approximately 1857. Daughter of a wealthy plantation owner, she grew up in luxury, being taught by an older sister instead of attending school. After the Civil War, her family lost much of their wealth. When her already elder parents both died in the mid-1880s, a distant cousin (Thomas McCulloch-Williams) arrived on the scene to help run the farm. Martha’s three sisters soon thereafter decided to sell out instead. Martha, an aspiring writer, moved with Thomas (whom she never actually married) to New York City. In 1882, she published Field-Farings, her first book. It was followed soon thereafter by many works of fiction, including over two hundred short stories. Later, she would gain renown for her domestic works, including a cookbook and household handbook. Eventually, Thomas and all three of her sisters died, then fire swept through her Manhattan apartment, leaving her destitute. She died in a New Jersey nursing home in 1934.

This book, then, is an orphan — her only foray into something akin to nature writing. Its closest relatives, from what I have read thus far, would be Prose Pastorals by Herbert Sylvester (published five years earlier) and Minstrel Weather by Marion Storm (published 28 years later). The work consists of a seasonal round of poetic vignettes of farm landscapes and life in Tennessee. For the first half of the book, the reader is led by the author through each scene, most of which are devoid of other human presences. The language is poetic and sentence structures are sometimes fluid, sometimes awkward, and almost always somewhat difficult to digest. At times, her word choices feel almost like the reimagined Anglo-Saxon of Gerard Manley Hopkins. As the book progresses, scenes of country life (such as haying) replace woodland explorations, and the reader is introduced to a few of the “darkies” who live in the area and presumably are the descendants of former plantation slaves. Always there is a hint of magic, of fairie. At various points, she speaks of elves, gnomes, wood-sprites, and Dyads. It is not that McCulloch-Williams disavows science — rather, she puts science in its place and lets magical thinking have a bit of room, too. Here, she writes about mysterious lights in the swamp, jack o’lanterns as they were known:

Of still, warm nights you may see his fairy lights adance over all the wooded swamp. Now they circle some huge, bent trunk, now leap bounding to the branches for the most part, though, plod slow and fitful, as though they were indeed true lantern rays, guiding the night-traveller by safe ways to his goal. Master Jack is full of treacherous humor. Follow him at your peril. He flies and flies, ever away, to vanish at last over the swamp’s worst pitfall, leaving you fast in the mire.

Wise folk say he has no volition he but flees before the current set up by your motion. We of the wood know better. There is method in Jack’s madness. He knows whereof he does. Science shall not for us resolve him into his original elements turn him to rubbish of gases and spontaneous combustion. Spite his tricksy treachery, he shall stay to light fairies on their revels, scare the hooting owls to silence.

This is not Burroughs, that is certain. Indeed, McCulloch-Williams names no antecedent writers; her only clear inspiration is her childhood on the plantation. Nature, in her eyes, is not some remote wilderness; it is part of the domestic world of her youth. Nature and humans coexist in this landscape — or at least, they do after the original forest was cleared:

Trees give room only through steel and fire. The felling is not a tenth part of the battle. Have you ever thought what it means to wrest an empire from the wilderness ? Do but look at those four sturdy fellows, racing, as for life, to the great yellow poplar’s heart. Four feet through, if one — sap and heart ateem with new blood, just begun to stir in this February sun — it is a field as fair, as strenuous, as any whereon athletes ever won a triumph of mighty muscle.

Once the plow arrives on the scene, so, too, does a host of birdlife. In this vignette, plowing the land not only yields future crops for the landowner but also an immediate gift to the birds:

In flocks, in clouds almost, they settle in each new furrow, a scant length behind the plough, hopping, fluttering, chirping, pecking eagerly at all the luckless creeping things whose deep lairs have suffered earthquake. A motley crowd indeed! Here be crow and blackbird, thrush and robin, song-sparrow, bluebird, bee-martin, and wren. How they peep and chirp, looking in supercilious scorn one at the other, making short flights over each other’s backs to settle with hovering motion nearer, ever nearer, the plough. Who shall say theirs is not the thrift, the wisdom, of experience. How else should they know thus to snatch dainty morsels breakfast, truly, on the fat of the land, for only the trouble of picking it up ? All day they follow, follow. It is the idle time now, when they are not under pressure of nest-making. Though mating is past, yet many a pretty courtship goes on in the furrow. Birds are no more constant, nor beyond temptation, than are we, the unfeathered of bipeds.

And so the vignettes rush by (or drag, depending upon my own reading mood at the time), from winter into spring, to summer, autumn, and back again, ending the round at Christmastime. The result is a sort of literary Currier and Ives calendar, with scenes a bit like the image below, but without the grand plantation home (no buildings other than cabins are mentioned in this book) and with the Mississippi River replaced with the Cumberland.

By Currier and Ives – Digital scan of a reprint of an original chromolithograph., Public Domain, https://commons.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?curid=7530803

The problem with vignettes is that nothing actually happens. The height of drama in the book is a chapter toward the end in which a nighttime hunting party trees some opossums and raccoons. There are no fond memories here, not even tales of sauntering through the woods and some of the discoveries made along the way. As a volume on the edge of the nature genre, it acquaints the reader with Tennessee phenology but tells very little about the actual landscape and names no geographical locations. As sense-of-place literature, it largely fails. If I did not know where the writer grew up, I would not know where the book is set. Only the presence of “darkies” reminds the reader that it is a long way from New England.

Finally, about my copy of this book: it appears to be the first edition (though I doubt it had a second) and is in remarkably good condition, apart from the very tanned pages. After a series of books with uncut pages, I was surprised to see that this one had probably been read before. I do not know who owned it, but I do know who gave it as a gift: Dr. Dowdell Wilson, Christmas 1896. And I think I found her — yes, her: Dr. Maria Louise Dowdell Wilson, a physician in Troy, New York: alumnus of Boston University School of Medicine (1877) and second wife of Hiram Austin Wilson (1887). She passed away in October 1902.

In These Degenerate Days: “Sand Dunes and Salt Marshes” by Charles Wendell Townsend (1913)

 Birds, book review, Books, Environmental conservation, Natural History, Ocean, Sense of Place  No Responses »
Jul 162022
 

Charles Wendell Townsend, MD was born in Boston in 1859, “of good old New England stock” (as an “In Memorium” piece by Glover Allen in The Auk puts it). He developed an early interest in birds, which at the time mostly involved collecting eggs and shooting “specimens”. In 1885, Townsend graduated from Harvard Medical School as a Doctor of Medicine. He married Gertrude Flint of Brookline, Massachusetts, and set up a private practice in Boston. In 1892, he built a summer house on a ridge overlooking a coastal marsh in Ipswich, Massachusetts, just north of Cape Ann. He would spend both summer vacations and weekends there over many years, increasingly opting to observe nature with binoculars and telescope instead of a gun. His particular interest was the land and shore birds frequenting the area, but he also closely observed changes in the dunes over time; the dunes took on a very different appearance in the summer than in the winter. He traveled extensively through the marshlands by boat, and became closely acquainted with the region’s natural history, including its geology (with its “pleasures and possibilities”). Remarking that “I have sometimes been asked what I found of interest in the dunes and marshes,” Towsend explained that “This little book [Sand Dunes and Salt Marshes] is the answer.” He published it in 1913, followed by Beach Grass in 1923. (That book will be explored in a future post.) Travel was another facet of Townsend’s life; he made several trips to Labrador, first by steamer and later by canoe, publishing several books about the region, particularly its human and bird life (at least one volume of which will also be covered in this blog at some point). He continued to travel extensively (including around the world) up to the time of his passing in 1934.

Taken as a whole, the book is a tribute to the rich natural history of the dunes and marshes of northern Massachusetts over one hundred years ago. While the text at times feels a bit dry (rather like the dunes themselves), Townsend’s photographs throughout are a delight. They depict landscapes at the time, animal tracks through the dunes, marsh haying operations, and a few images of the wildlife itself. Because he returned so frequently over many years, Townsend was able to document changes, such as the image below of a shipwreck soon after it happened and again a year later. For much of the book, I struggled a bit with his prose. I did enjoy his chapter on tracks in the dunes, where he identifies dune visitors by their tracks, and their meals by investigations of scats and bird pellets. He closes the chapter by declaring that “The study of ichnology and scatology in these sandy wastes is as absorbing as a detective story.” His bird chapters that followed were informative but so laden with bird descriptions (and, alas, no bird close-up photographs) that they were tough going. I think the main challenge to the reader is that Townsend himself is largely absent from most of the volume, stepping aside to report scientifically what he has seen. Oddly, though, the book is also interspersed with chunks of poetry — some identified by the author, others not (Townsend’s own writing?). Here, again, is that concept of the time, that effective nature writing combines both the scientific and the poetic sensibilities. Unfortunately, in this case, the two are mostly kept separate.

Townsend cooks a meal amid the dunes in winter.

The tone changes when Townsend reaches the salt marsh. Here, his voice strikes an enthusiastic, joyful tone that is uncommon in the rest of the book. Consider this passage describing the salt marsh in late summer:

All the marsh vegetation is at its height of luxuriance in mid-August. Then the marsh lies brilliant in the sunlight, a broad expanse, flat as a floor and glowing in yellow-greens, touched here and there with washes of buff and of chestnut.

Fringing its upper edge is the broad band of the mourning black-grass, while the rich dark green of the thatch threads invisible serpentine creeks, and borders the ribbons of water that wander hither and thither like tortuous veins through the marshes, reflecting the brilliant blue of the skies. There are wonderful plays of light and shade as cloud shadows chase each other over the surface of the marshes, or as the lengthening shadows of the hills extend their range with the declining sun. On windy days the tall thatch bends before the blasts, and shimmering waves like those on the surface of the water pass over it.

On such days, with the wind in the north- west quarter, the air is exceedingly clear, and every wooded island and distant hill stands out with great distinctness, while the creeks take on an intense blue which contrasts strongly with the light green of the marshes.

The tides creeping over the sand flats, swell- ing the creeks, obliterating the brown banks and drowning the tall thatch, bursting out in unexpected veins and pools throughout the marshes,-all this, notwithstanding its twice daily repetition, is never other than a miracle.

or this passage about exploring the salt marsh creeks by boat at low tide:

To float down in a canoe with the ebb tide, to explore the narrow channels now sunk deep below the marsh level, to surprise the marsh birds on the broad sand and mud flats, to push over the waving forests of eel grass and their varied inhabitants, affrds much enjoyment, and opens up an entirely different world from that of the same water courses when they are brimming over onto the marsh. Partly from prejudice, partly from ignorance, dead low tide is not appreciated as it deserves. The clean sand of the estuaries and the fine mud of the smaller creeks and inlets, and the clear water of the sea, are all very different from the foulness to be found at low tide in the neighborhood of sewer-discharging cities.

For the reader of today, a clear theme throughout this book is the impact of humans upon nature, already underway in the 1910s and 1920s. Townsend notes the ongoing increase of invasive species, including beach wormwood (a plant), and the European periwinkle (a snail). He notes that deer numbers are up in the region, compared to their total absence in Thoreau’s day (1853), partly due to highly protective hunting laws in eastern Massachusetts, but also resulting from the extirpation of wolves, lynxes, panthers, and Indians from the region. Harbor seals, Townsend observes, are starting to return to the coast; until 1908, Massachusetts placed a bounty on them, intended as a boon to fishermen afraid of seals jeopardizing their livelihoods. Finally, there is mention of the impacts of the millinery trade on birds, specifically common terns:

Not so many years ago various fragments and the whole skins of these beautiful birds were fastened on women’s hats, just as scalps and feathers are fastened on the head-dresses of savages. Thousands of the birds were shot down where they could be most easily obtained. namely, on their breeding grounds, for they are plucky little birds and valiantly attack any marauder who intrudes on their homes, and they do not seek to escape. These, as well as other species of birds, were greatly reduced in numbes by this cold-hearted combination of fashion and slaughterers, when, through the strenuous efforts rof the Audubon Society ad of ther bird lovers, the killing was stayed, and, too the great joy of all naturalists, the graceful birds are again increasing.

Meanwhile, the situation for piping plovers and other shore birds remained grim. Consider the tragic fate of the immature sanderlings, who endure a barrage of guns every fall:

In the middle of August the young, sadly inexperienced, arrive, and in their tameness fall an easy prey to the gunner. They are beautiful birds, with faint smoky bands across their white breasts. It is a great pleasure to watch a flock as they crowd together along the shore, probing every spot of sand for the small molluscs and crustaceans which consti- tute their food. As the season advances our pleasure is somewhat dimmed by the fact that cripples, with a foot shot away or blood-stained sides, are common in their ranks.

The piping plovers, another shorebird species, are on the path to extinction:

Up to half a dozen years ago the piping plover bred regularly in the dunes and laid its eggs in the sand. It belongs to a dying race, and although it is protected by law at all seasons, I fear this is not sufficient to stop its path to extinction. So long as the law permits the shooting of other plovers of the same size and the small sandpipers, one cannot expect the ordinary gunner to discriminate, as in fact he is unable to do, and the piping plover is shot with the rest. Only by stopping all shooting, or by the creation of bird refuges, can the tendency to extinction of this and other shore birds be prevented.

The 1925 “New Edition” of this book (which I read) adds a hopeful footnote: “The passage of the Federal Migratory Bird Act has since stopped the shooting of most of our shore birds.” Indeed, despite its grim moments (for instance, disparaging “these degenerate times” for all the wanton shooting of wildlife), even the first edition of 1913 manages to strike a somewhat hopeful note, at least in regards to seabird protection:

What a joy it would be to have a return of the old conditions, when terns and piping plover bred in the dunes, and when shore birds large and small thronged the beaches, and when the sea teemed with water fowl. Many of the birds I have mentioned in this chapter are on the way to extinction, some have already disappeared forever; a few, happily as a result of protection, are increasing. In Japan it is said that when travelling artisans see an eagle, they take out their sketching tablets and record its beautiful shape and attitudes. The barbarians of this part of the world try to shoot it, a fate they have often meted out to every large or unusual bird they came across, even if it were of no value to them, and they left it to rot where it fell. Fortunately times are changing and the people are gradually awakening to the idea that money value in food or plumage, or even in work done for man, is not the only thing for which birds should be protected. We are also beginning to realize that the interest which finds pleasure in the sport of bird destruction is a very limited and a very selfish one, and that the claims of the sportsman are not paramount to those of the nature student or even of the lover of natural beauty.

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